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Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

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Re: Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

#121

Post by Avshalom »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #98
bloomer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird that this is being downvoted because Uber has shown no interest in acquiring and managing assets (self-driving cars or even their own cars) which is a completely different business than being a marketer for independent taxis. If self-driving cars become a business it seems like rental car companies would be ideally positioned to take advantage of them.

Uber is the ultimate middleman company. It would only work if people bought their own self driving cars and rented them out to Uber to make some extra money.

At which point of course owners would shop for top dollar and riders would shop for rock bottom and they'd still be stuck lighting money on fire to subsidize rides.

Re: Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

#122

Post by devicetray0 »

tempsy wrote: post #55
throwaway_law wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>still the largest and most successful company to come out of SF this decade. That's a lot less reflective of UBER and more reflective of the type of startups SV is trying to take public. Look at any other SV Unicorn that IPO'd...take Twitter that IPO'd in 2013, it turned a profit one year since going public.

I'm using market cap as a proxy for success not profit... Twitter isn't really a shining example of success either - their share price has been sideways for 6 years.

> I'm using market cap as a proxy for success not profit...

Market cap is not and has never been a good proxy for success.

Re: Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

#123

Post by asdf333 »

hluska wrote: post #63
ProAm wrote: post #15

Is anyone really surprised? Years before the IPO we knew they were not profitable in the least. We knew VC cash was subsidizing rides. We knew that their future was purely dependent on a self-driving car fleet where they could ditch drivers (and their pay) completely. This on top of a horrible culture with pretty lousy ethics and morality. This is how this was supposed to play out and everyone here (on HN) knew that.…

This will sound very naive (because it is), but I thought that the free market would see through the bullshit and value them appropriately. That is happening, just far more slowly than I imagined.

at least its happening. you could argue that uber's insane valuations before were due to deluded vcs (non-free-market)

now that its a publicly traded company and its financials are transparent to investors, the free market is doing what it is supposed to do.

Re: Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

#124

Post by tzs »

ProAm wrote: post #15

Is anyone really surprised? Years before the IPO we knew they were not profitable in the least. We knew VC cash was subsidizing rides. We knew that their future was purely dependent on a self-driving car fleet where they could ditch drivers (and their pay) completely. This on top of a horrible culture with pretty lousy ethics and morality. This is how this was supposed to play out and everyone here (on HN) knew that.…

> We knew that their future was purely dependent on a self-driving car fleet where they could ditch drivers (and their pay) completely.

I've never really understood this.

Their drivers do more than just drive, don't they? They also supply the cars, and deal with maintenance of those cars. If Uber switches to a self-driving fleet and ditches human drivers, who will own the cars?

If Uber owns or leases the cars, Uber will have to be dealing with maintenance. I suppose they could go to a model where people who have bought self-driving cars can let Uber use them when the owner does not need them, but then Uber has just replaced paying a zillion drivers with paying a zillion self-driving car owners.

So, assuming they go with the model where Uber is the one handling maintenance so they don't have to have a zillion pseudo-employees I don't see what would stop other companies from doing this better.

If Waymo wanted to go for that market, for instance, they have better self-driving technology, and could probably get integrated with the Google Maps app that is already on everyone's phone so they wouldn't have to convince people to download anything. Sure, Waymo doesn't currently have, as far as I know, anything set up for managing and maintaining a large fleet of cars...but neither does Uber.

Or what about the car makers? Many of them are working on self-driving, too. I could see some of them deploying self-driving taxi fleets, with maintenance handled through their dealers. This could become a new sales channel for them--new car to their taxi fleet for a couple years, then sold off as a used car which the buyer can be assured was well maintained and still has a good warranty.

Imagine your self-driving Audi/BMW/Mercedes/etc taxi dropping you off at home at the end of the day, and then presenting you with a report showing how much you used the service over the last year, how much it cost you, and how it would have been cheaper for you to have your own private self-driving car, and offering to sell you that very car. If you accept, the car drives back to the dealer, gets cleaned, inspected, tuned up, and drives back to your place to be waiting for you to take ownership the next morning.

In summary, owning and operating a fleet of self-driving taxis is sufficiently different from what Uber does now that I'm not sure that Uber has any particular advantage over anyone else who might want to do so, and might even be at a disadvantage, so I'm skeptical that this is their future.

Re: Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

#125

Post by x0x0 »

dehrmann wrote: post #85
ProAm wrote: post #15

Is anyone really surprised? Years before the IPO we knew they were not profitable in the least. We knew VC cash was subsidizing rides. We knew that their future was purely dependent on a self-driving car fleet where they could ditch drivers (and their pay) completely. This on top of a horrible culture with pretty lousy ethics and morality. This is how this was supposed to play out and everyone here (on HN) knew that.…

This reads like the usual Uber criticism and doesn't touch on the lockup. The market knew the lockup was ending, so it should have been priced in. Dropping when the lockup ends should mean that markets underestimated how many insiders wanted to cash out, and employee sentiment is worse than market sentiment.

I dunno, but I wouldn't read too much about employee sentiment into this.

Say you have $150k in savings and $x million in Uber stock. Any competent financial advisor is going to get you to diversify out of Uber. You'll miss upside, but prevent that $x million from potentially going to zero based on the actions of just one company.

Also... goodbye sf housing market :(

Re: Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

#126

Post by mikraig »

chollida1 wrote: post #87
pbreit wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core business is very profitable. Loss-making is happening in their less mature product categories and expansion efforts.

> The core business is very profitable. Loss-making is happening in their less mature product categories and expansion efforts. Not really. It is true that in their non GAAP accounting they broker out revenue by segment and showed that "Rides" made a profit of $631M but they also include categories for eats, freight and other bets that lost money. But the kicker is that they introduced a category called "Corporate G&…

...what's $631M - $621M?

I agree that they're losing money overall. But just the ridesharing part is making enough profit to cover the entire Corporate G&A line item.

Re: Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

#127

Post by dragontamer »

cj wrote: post #115
dehrmann wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like the usual Uber criticism and doesn't touch on the lockup. The market knew the lockup was ending, so it should have been priced in. Dropping when the lockup ends should mean that markets underestimated how many insiders wanted to cash out, and employee sentiment is worse than market sentiment.

Agreed, I came to post the same thing. The lockup period is a known event (nothing to be suprised about). The market already adjusted the stock price to reflect the anticipated insider cash out after the lock up. Any rise or fall in the price at the specific time the lockup ends is because the reality is different than what the market anticpated.

Volume is extremely important.

The 90-day average volume for Uber is ~10-million shares per day. Lets pretend you knew that Uber was going to drop today (last week). How many shares do you sell short?

That 10-million average is ALL market trades, buying, selling, etc. etc. If 10-million shares were short-sold, it'd take a full day to cover all of those shares (based on average volume). There's only so much trading activity that happens at any given moment in time.

Well, what happened today? Uber is now up to... (check's Yahoo finance...) 95-million volume, and counting.

Huh. Well, I guess you could have sold more shares short last week. But given the 10-million share 90-day average volume, there was basically no way to predict 95-million shares traded before noon come Wednesday.

Re: Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

#128

Post by MaupitiBlue »

dd36 wrote: post #59
hodder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the same could be said of Tesla. Horrible employer, constant exec churn, unbelievable cash burn, what appears to be structural losses.... But Tesla still has a 56B mcap today. Uber is 46B. These VC/equity issue cash furnaces can go on longer than most can fathom if a subset of investors believe in the long term vision.

Tesla is building a product. Automated dispatch is not protectable.

Like Hertz and Avis and Budget aren’t already established brands in the fleet financing, servicing, and dispatch business.

Re: Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

#129

Post by tempsy »

devicetray0 wrote: post #122
tempsy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using market cap as a proxy for success not profit... Twitter isn't really a shining example of success either - their share price has been sideways for 6 years.

> I'm using market cap as a proxy for success not profit... Market cap is not and has never been a good proxy for success.

I think you're referring to private valuations

Re: Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

#130

Post by ghaff »

sschueller wrote: post #113
jamiequint wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a pretty cynical and inaccurate way of looking at it. They did create hundreds of thousands of part-time to full-time jobs which presumably did not benefit only the 1%. They did drastically lower the price of point-to-point transportation, thereby massively expanding the market for it which presumably did not benefit only the 1%. etc

But all of that was temporary. The jobs go away when Uber falls apart and the cheap point to point transport paid for by VCs is also gone. However the taxi companies that existed are now gone as they could not compete with Uber and the ones that could compete are working for less than before.

Whatever the companies/brands are, we'll still see app-dispatched taxis, at least until such time as door-to-door self-driving shows up--which IMO is going to be a very long time.

It's true that prices probably go up relative to where they are today which presumably reduces the demand and makes these services less viable in less dense locations.

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